Andrea Stella describes the aggressive approach and innovative ideas employed by McLaren during their 2025 season, which led to their dominance this season.
McLaren sits on the top standings in both championship in the 2025 Formula 1 season. The team picked up where they left off at the end of the previous season. The Papaya cars were able to win the constructor’s championship last year, however, they couldn’t clinch the drivers’ title. This year, McLaren is looking forward towards a dominant victory in both championships.
The team has been giving their best in every department this year. It’s no surprise that the McLaren drivers have won 11 out of 14 races this year. Both Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris are equally competitive and viable to win the driver’s championship this year. Andrea Stella, who is the team principal of McLaren, expresses his surprise at how the season has played out for them so far. He also sheds light on the aggressive strategy employed by McLaren in 2025.
Stella was talking about the team philosophy during the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend. He says that McLaren wanted to be very “ambitious” for the 2025 season. The team was surprisingly faster than the rest of the grid in the latter half of the 2024 season.
The McLaren MCL39 is a very innovative car according to Andrea Stella. The team was nervous about the performance of the car owing to its aggressive approach. Although, the results of the 2025 season have been a major positive for McLaren.
“We wanted to try and clear the ‘going into race weekends and you never know who’s going to win’ situation we had last year, and we thought we needed to do a little bit more than the normal development.
“So how do we do that? We embraced a very aggressive approach to innovation. The MCL39 is a very innovative car.
“From an engineering point of view, we’ve been nervous as to whether we were actually in the condition to deliver them. But then when we looked at the lap times and the numbers in simulations, actually, we thought that wouldn’t be enough.”
Andrea Stella also emphasised on the effectiveness of the upgrades employed by the team. He says that the rate of progress at McLaren is much better than what he experiences in Ferrari.
Stella was the race engineer for Fernando Alonso and worked closely with Michael Schumacher and Kimi Raikkonen at Ferrari. Stella also praised the fact that McLaren did not have any superstars and both drivers are equally competitive giving the team the required input.
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